wasn't expecting much

“Widow’s Peak” only looks like another stuffy British comedy drama. In fact it’s a wonderfully witty, serio-comic little mystery with a very good cast and one of the better ending twists i’ve seen in a movie in a while.


Set in the Irish hamlet of Kilshannon in the 1920’s, the village seems almost famous for the close-knit group of widows who all live in cottages on a hill outside of town. Mrs. Doyle Counihan (Joan Plowright) is their stern queen bee, a woman who hosts teas, lunches, and entertains all manner of gossip as long as it fits her idea of decorum.


A shake-up is on the horizon though when Edwinna Broome (Natasha Richardson) moves in. She’s a Brit, which automatically infuriates Counihan’s most trusted friend Miss O’Hare (Mia Farrow), who sees the Brits as a colonizing people that have trod upon the Irish for years. When Broome mentions her husband liked to hunt in Ireland, O’Hare sarcastically snaps back with “What did he shoot? Irishmen?”


Broome can feel the woman’s antagonism and wants to correct it but O’Hare will have none of it, spurning any attempt at conciliation with a scowl and rage-filled diatribes against the woman who she feels has done her great wrong, even though she’s done nothing.


Doyle-Counihan doesn’t really understand but she has sights of her own. Broome’s husband has left her very well-off, and part of the reason she’s moved to the village is to avoid fortune hunters. But since competition is light, Doyle-Counihan believes her son Godfrey (Adrian Dunbar) holds the best chance at success with her.


Here’s a movie where both lead characters have sharp tongues, feisty demeanors, and a lot of buried secrets that they would both probably like to keep buried. But the film gets darker still- they seem to scheme against each other in devious ways that can’t be proven. Cars are tampered with, a regatta almost turns into a forced drowning, and murder is on the way.


O’Hare is also a great suspicious character- we’re never quite sure if her “queer ideas” on things make her fully crazy, or if she’s just been painted as such by the many gossipy widows of Kilshannon. We also don’t know what she holds over them to remain such a valued member of the group- as they all live comfortably noble lives while she struggles to make ends meet money-wise.


Farrow plays it well; an otherwise pleasant woman who suddenly becomes overcome by vindictiveness and paranoia, flying into rude rages with every appearance of this new interloper. What helps even more is her conviction that she is in the right, even though Broome seems an overall lovely woman.


But Richardson is equally fun- especially as she continually feels goaded into this competition with the woman and we see her edge come out. Plowright gets MVP here though- getting the sharpest of dialogue and doing best with it. “Enough’s enough, we don’t want to spoil them”, she tells her crew of widows, as they tend to their husband’s graves.


This all ends in utter perfection- as we see O’Hare and Broome arguing with each other while on a boat out to sea together. Only one comes back and it’s to screenwriter Hugh Leonard’s great credit that we have no idea what’s happened or where we’re going next. That he encompasses all the movie’s themes of the pitfalls of gossip to the wronged natures of both of his leads is peak form, and the cherry on top of a very surprisingly good film.